Chapter 27 #3
His body shivered against mine, and I slid my hands around his waist, pulling him tighter as Araxis buried his face in the crook of my neck.
"You were right," he rasped against my skin.
"You were right, beloved. If I had come alone, I would have died.
I do not think anyone else would have acted so swiftly.
You saved me, and you should not have had to. " His voice broke, then, at the end.
I shifted so that I could press my mouth against his temple; I held him against my body and inhaled deeply so that he could feel the rise of my chest and its fall.
"We're in this together," I said, voice soft against the point of his ear.
"Being equal doesn't just mean in respect.
It means in everything. I'll take care of you like you take care of me. "
He nodded against me, still folded hard into my chest, as if the world beyond the space where our bodies met was too big and too awful to contemplate right now.
"I've been in touch with Vivith," he said distantly, emptily.
"They will coordinate a swift departure.
We should have everything packed and finalized by end-of-day tomorrow.
We'll stay here tonight – and after. We will only leave to load the final goods from our warehouse. "
The thought of not going back at all made me inexplicably sad, although there wasn't really anything about Sozamia that felt like home. But it was the first place I'd ever been where I'd had some measure of freedom.
I was used to leaving suddenly, though. I could handle that.
"Alright," I said, shifting so that I could stroke one hand down his braided crest. He moved, curling himself against the centre of my chest, folding up as small as he could get while I held him.
"We'll stay here. Everything is mostly ready, I think.
I've got all the orders in." Elethenn and Inmadra would be able to corral everything back at the suite.
We had enough sets of hands now to make sure everything was packed, and crates had been slowly gathering in the corners of all of the rooms anyway.
Although –
"Someone told Naival where to find us. To find you." Stars above, I hated that Vivith was right.
"Yes, so Vivith has said – but is it not equally possible that a dock guard tipped them off to our route? It was registered with the station. And Hanalthi supported Naival's writ. They are everywhere in the guard."
Look, I am intimately familiar with wanting something to be true so badly that you ignore stupid things like the odds. It was a stretch even for me, although what was the alternative? That someone like Thodin, quiet and steady and shy, had sold us out?
I couldn't bear to think it.
"I suppose that's possible," I murmured against his skin, because he needed it to be possible. But when Vivith got to the ship, I was going to have to sit down for a real conversation with them about what to do with the likelihood that we had a spy among us. Well, another one. "So what's next?"
"Vivith is liaising with our provisioners to assure we're ready to depart tomorrow," he said, quiet; his subvocals were humming with an unfamiliar pitch, and it made him sound, in that moment, young and vulnerable.
"We must leave as soon as possible. We cannot risk something happening to the ship. We cannot risk – this happening."
"Okay." I leaned back a little so that I could press another kiss to his temple, and he made a soft, pleased sound – much nicer than the distressed whine that had been humming in his throat. "Whatever you need."
And I meant it. What price would I pay to have him?
Any price. If the cost of being with Araxis was living with the threat of death and violence, I would pay it without hesitation, because what was the point of my life if I was alone again?
I'd tried, and it was misery. It wasn't freedom, it was suffering.
If I had to choose between a supernova-bright life with Araxis – short and intense and ending in a fiery explosion – and a long life without, of course I would choose him.
Maybe some part of me had realized that all along.
When you start like we did, with lies and violence and blood on the sands, maybe that's all you can have.
I think I would have liked a quiet life with him…
but I wouldn't trade him in exchange for a quiet life, not even in a passing fancy.
Once he was ready, I helped him up from the floor of the hallway.
We walked the ship, checking the exits over and locking everything down mechanically so that no one could get in without punching a hole in the hull, and then we drifted upstairs to our bedroom.
He went to the display to return to the endless stream of messages lighting up his wristband, but I tapped it off.
"No," I said, firm. "You've said what needs to be said tonight.
Let me take care of you." I reached and unclasped his wristband, sliding it from his skin and turning it off while he stood, quiet and still, in the middle of the room.
I slipped my own off as well, setting them on one of the shelves that had been added to the exterior wall.
I felt, then, like something else had shifted, but I couldn't tell whether it was within me or if it was between us.
Maybe it was both. But as I looked at him then, swaying slightly on his feet, blood dried in a rivulet from one ear, I saw in Araxis not the supernova who bathed me in light and drew me inexorably into his orbit; I didn't see the prince with his lying mouth and gleaming swords; I didn't even see what he saw in me, a navigational star.
I saw… Araxis. Young and lonely and hurting; fighting desperately to fulfill the promises he'd made to his creche, his parent, his sibling, his lover. He wasn't perfect; he was pretending at being composed. Like me, he was struggling through the dark. He was making it up as he went along.
And I loved him all the more for it.
I closed the space between us, brushing my hand down his crest. "Sit," I said, firm, moving him back so that he settled on the edge of the bed.
"And stay there." I found a cloth in the hygiene room, wetting it with warm water before bringing it back.
I knelt before him as he had done, back in the guard station when he'd washed blood from my split knuckles, when he'd rested his head in the cradle of my violent hands.
Gently, so gently, I brushed the cloth against the skin of his neck, slowly washing away the trickle of his own blood, gleaming in the dim lights overhead.
As I tended to him, his stare was lost in the distance somewhere over my shoulder. "I don't know what to do," he said finally, soft, barely an exhale. "I don't know what comes next."
"You do," I told him. "You take us to Xitera. You attend all of those meetings you've been scheduling. You get Creche Thiel reinstated in the Hall of Records, and then you make the Concord regret the day they ever came for you and your people."
The corner of his mouth twitched, but he didn't smile. "It sounds simple when you put it like that."
"Everything sounds simple when I say it," I joked, dabbing at the last bit of dried blood that had gathered at the edge of his jaw. "It's because I don't use big words."
His hands tightened in his lap. "You should not listen to what Vivith says.
I've heard you speak without inhibition, so I understand just how brilliant you are, even if you like to...
pretend otherwise on occasion." The look he shot me, perceptive and shot through with affection, made me flush, just a little.
I guess he had been inside of my head on the judiciary ship. And maybe I didn't mind that now as much as I had before.
"We do one thing after the other," I said, setting the cloth aside and resting my hands on his knees, letting my head fall to the back of my hands in an almost perfect mirror of the way he'd knelt before me those weeks ago.
"We take care of each other and we take care of the creche.
Fuck everything Nizanin had to say. We're not going to leave anyone behind because they can't keep up.
We'll take care of everyone. That's who you are. That's who we are."
His hand shifted, fingers threading through my hair, and I heard the rumble in his chest. "Yes," he murmured. "Yes, that is who we are. I must remember, even when it is hard. It will be hard, I think, when we are in Xitera."
"That's why you have me," I said. "So I can remind you. I'm your navigational star, right? Look at me, and I'll always bring you home."
He did look at me then, eyes dark and glossy; his shoulders were trembling a little, his expression open and unguarded and terrified.
I studied him, looking up at him in the same way I might look at one of Celravi's sculptures: trying to see all the complexity, to grasp at the meaning, to feel the full weight of him echoing in my chest.
I knelt before him, stroking my thumbs against his knees. "What do you want tonight?" I asked, quiet.
His eyes fluttered shut, as if he couldn't look at me when he said it.
His chest rose, breath catching in his throat.
The line of his mouth was unsteady. "I –" He stopped, his hands flexing on the edge of our bed.
"I –" And then, with a sharp little exhale, he switched to abayan, "I place myself in the palm of your hand.
That is what I want, to be yours, entirely. "
The words landed, one by one, with a burst of recognition.
I stared up at him: his pale eyelids, closed; the tension in his jaw; the way his angular features had tightened, as if in preparation for pain.
That was a declaration, or part of it. Like he was declaring for me, although arkathi couldn't declare for ishik.
Like he was offering himself to me in the particular way that a virra could declare for a sinnenthi: to yield entirely, to be entirely in my control.